Perhaps I should leave this to my colleague Fred Abraham, but it has really been worrying me. The question is: How (not when) is this economy going to turn around?

Industrial economies are based on the creation of real surplus value. You take copper from the ground, smelt it and pour up some plumbing pipes. People will pay you more than it cost you to make them. Or take milk, pasteurize and bottle it and deliver it to a household, and people will pay. Value-added makes it possible to keep many people working to produce and deliver the goods and services we all want.

Value-added also is behind the common understanding that every industrial job makes possible three or four other jobs. All those producers need to buy their groceries, fill their gas tanks, have their children taught, and get their taxes done. America's economy has been dominated by services for decades, but still, there has been a base of industrial jobs to provide fundamental support.

Now? America is shedding industrial jobs faster than a snake sheds a too-small skin. Those who think about these things used to say that industrial workers would be replaced by knowledge workers and we would all be enjoying greater prosperity for reduced effort. But we're working harder and faster, lost jobs are not being replaced and not everyone is equipped for or interested in knowledge work anyway. For a while, high-paying factory jobs with benefits were replaced by low-paying fast-food and retail jobs with no benefits. Now, though, those jobs are shrinking too. Funding for "job retraining" will not help if there are no jobs to retrain for.

The economic boom we just left behind was created on mirage and imagery, fraud and fakery. Why were we willing to believe that the stock market behaves rationally and is the true measure of wealth? Perhaps it's because, like a Ponzi scheme, it works for a while. Hot stock markets, like housing bubbles or tulip manias, generate lots of money for lots of people, but they can't last. Sooner or later, the fundamental irrationality of markets causes a nosedive and then we all lose our shirts.

Several decades of deregulation created a wealth of opportunities for making money through imaginative if indecent schemes, and yet the underlying stories are ancient and few. See a tree laden with low-hanging fruit and greedily pick it all. Gain people's trust and steal them blind. Fake it 'til you make it, then get out fast. Values, in the current economics, don't belong in the concept of value-added.

The American people are better than this. We don't deserve an economy full of Enrons, WorldComs, AIGs and Madoffs. We don't deserve the forced, stressed-out "leisure" of unemployment. We don't deserve to be scammed.

This crash reveals a deep and largely unaddressed problem with our efforts to "turn the economy around." We're thinking about it as though it were possible to return to the old days of industrialism, but in America, those days cannot return. For manufacturing, the lure of the developing world is too strong. Nor would we want a turnaround based on increasing opportunities for fraud and deceit. The fact is, our economic model depends on unsustainable expectations.

Public companies crash when they "fail to meet the number," that magical estimate of how much their earnings should grow each quarter. Meeting the numbers, though, has required many companies to move operations offshore where costs are lower, and for others, it hasn't been that hard to fake. For those who aren't off-shoring or faking it, legitimate success demands continuous growth, but this requires environmental plundering and is not the road to long-term prosperity. The economy will turn around in a sustainable way when we develop new reasons and new avenues for productivity.

What if we valued meaningful work that provides sufficient income for a decent life? We might emphasize equal opportunity for everyone to make the best use of their talents and interests. We might decide to live without oil-based plastics that never disintegrate. We might build cities meant for people to live in and farms meant for healthy sustainable food production. We might develop clean, renewable sources of energy and deeper, broader, more widespread education. We might even re-create the repair sector that has gone missing in our throw-away society.

At some point in our economic history, values like these were removed from the concept of value-added. Maybe it's time to think hard about how to put them back in.